


Now You Don't

by kay_emm_gee



Series: Love Is Blind [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: 7+1 Things, Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-21
Updated: 2015-09-21
Packaged: 2018-04-22 15:57:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4841552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_emm_gee/pseuds/kay_emm_gee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>7 times Clarke doesn't see Bellamy (+1 time she does). Because Clarke is always looking for Bellamy, from the moment he was first taken from her, and each time she realizes he is not quite what she thinks he is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Now You Don't

**Author's Note:**

> So when I said part 2 was coming soon, I actually meant 9 months later oops. I am really proud of this piece though, so maybe it was worth the wait?

**_i. ghost_ **

Bellamy and Octavia are silent, though Clarke doubts either of them is sleeping. She certainly can’t, not when the ground is hard beneath her body, when she is worried about Finn out there with only Murphy for backup on their unknowingly pointless rescue mission.  

She can feel the heat from the fire waft over her face, hear the ominous rustle of the trees surrounding their resting place. Her nose clogs with the musty, rich scent of the earth beneath her cheek, smelling of dirt and decay. It is ugly, cloying, suffocating, as if her mouth, her nostrils are stuffed full of rotting wood, wet mud, and decomposing leaves. Like she is six feet under, buried with Wells, and Atom, and the kids who died at the dropship, with Anya—dead and but not quite gone.

Her bones are above ground though, still strung together with ligaments and tendons, still wrapped up in tired muscle and scarred skin. She is alive, against all odds. She is alive, like her mother, and Raven, Monroe, and Octavia. And Finn, and Bellamy. She can’t quite grasp that truth, that the two of them are alive. She saw the charred bones and seared flesh herself, a pair of skeletons at the foot of the dropship: two boys so different in life but seemingly just the same scorched ashes in death. But like her, they too rose from the grave, not yet ready to surrender to the ground either.

Her skin prickles, and not from the heat of the fire. Bellamy is watching her; she knows because her muscles tense and her pulse races in the same way it did when his ghost watched her under the mountain. He followed her everywhere down there, haunting her in the barest rumbling whisper, or the flash of brown around a corner. Though she had thought his body gone, disintegrated under flame that she herself had wrought, he had never left her, following her like a shadow. She had hated it then, a reminder of what the mountain’s safety (or the illusion of it, apparently, and that was an even more bitter pill to swallow) had cost them.

Now, though, in the dark, in the woods, on top of the earth instead of under it, the feel of his stare is becoming a welcome thing. It makes her bones ache, the pain reminding her that she is alive. Still, his gaze is not so different from that of his ghost’s, and so she has to open her eyes to make sure she isn’t the only one still breathing on this earth.

She sees brown, and not just a flash of it, her heartbeat easing at the sight of his eyes, weary as they are, but also glistening with life in the flickering firelight. As she stares back at him, she wishes she could trust her senses, that she could close her eyes and still believe he isn’t just bone and ash.

She is alive, and he isn’t a ghost, though, and she supposes that is all she can ask for on the ground.

So her eyes stay open, and he begins.

_The last time I saw you, you were closing the dropship door._

* * *

 

**_ii. parallel lines_ **

Clarke grimaces at the way Jaha steps forward to address the crowd, his fervent words clipping off the last of her mother’s uncertain ones.

 

_We’re discussing all options—_

_But to be safe, we need to pack now_.

 

Her mother inhales in surprise at the announcement. Jaha is going off-script, that much Clarke can ascertain, and it makes her stomach roll nauseously, because history is repeating itself.

She too wanted to leave once and had led her people away, but at times she also had stood in her mother’s place, watching a charismatic man sway the crowd in his favor.

 

_You two go, find it for us. Let the privileged do the hard work for a change._

_That wristband on your arm makes you a prisoner. We are not prisoners anymore! They say they’ll forgive your crimes. I say you’re not criminals!_

_This is our home now! We built this from nothing with our bare hands._

_Are we just a bunch of kids from the Ark who weren’t strong enough to survive? Because if we lose today, if we let the fear win, that is what they’ll say about us. But I say screw fear! I’m telling my own damn story._

 

She watches the two leaders stand in front of the fallen Ark. One is hesitant, and one self-assured. One wanting to fight, and one wanting to leave. Her present vision blurs with memories from the past, and it is enough to almost make her believe that the clocks have been rewound, that the crack in her father’s now useless watch is enough to have made the entirety of time itself come undone.

From among the tense crowd, she watches the two leaders—a light streak and a dark one, two lines running parallel but in such different directions— and acutely feels the missing piece at her side, the place where Bellamy should be standing.

Still, her people need a voice, even if it is a solitary one, so she speaks:  _if we leave here, what happens to our people in Mount Weather?_ Jaha’s negating reply hits her head on, and she is knocked off course, spinning wildly like the needle on a broken compass, because she stands alone.

She is jerked back into place when his hand tugs on her arm.

_You need to come back with me right now. Bring a med kit._

As they race together through the woods to the dropship, she swears she can hear her father’s watch ticking again. Time hasn’t stopped; the past is where it should be. The only direction they can go in is forward, and they do it side-by-side, parallel lines running in the same direction.

* * *

 

**_iii. faceless_ **

She wipes away the tears, smearing blood on her face, because it is already hard enough to see in the dark. Tears aren’t going to help her see the one face she is looking for, the one face that would be as horrified as her own, the one face that might also have a shred of understanding in it.

Would he say it ( _it had to be done_ ) this time too?

It is dark, though, and she is crying, try as she might not to. Her people are too far away, separated by a hill and a fence and days not spent on the ground, days not spent dodging spears and spiked traps, days not spent choosing who lives and who dies. She wasn’t supposed to have to choose down here, but the knife is in her hand, and Finn’s last words still whisper in her ear. So she looks for Bellamy, but with the tears and the dark and the distance that her choices put between her and her people, she can’t make him out.

Hours later, when she is close enough to him, she can’t look him in the eye, can’t bear the weight of the judgment or disgust that might be there.

He says it though— _you did the right thing_ —and she should be able to glance at him, to gaze at the smattering of freckles across his nose, or the gash on his cheek again.

It is only when she speaks, words tumbling out straight from her heart, bypassing the brain entirely, propelled past all barriers and pretenses by the gripping fear of not seeing his face again, ever again, that she faces him head-on, looking into his eyes as she tells him exactly why he can’t be their inside man.

There is no condemnation from him, to her surprise. It is just Bellamy, scarred but not scared, the same as always, and she wonders if she would’ve seen him on the Ark, the way she’s seeing him now: hers, just as much as she is his, and not just another face in the crowd.

* * *

 

**_iv. finn_ **

Dark hair, dark eyes—it is easy to make him Finn.

Too easy, in the shadows by the fire, the flickering light not quite bright enough to unmask Bellamy completely from the darkness of the forest. A good thing, because then she can pretend he has already vanished, six feet from her, under her, instead of half that distance and very much alive, looking at her with acceptance and shock in his fire-lit eyes.

_You should go._

_It’s worth the risk._

Maybe it is cruel to make him a dead boy, when he had so recently risen from the grave to come back to their people, to her. Still, it is easier to send him beneath again, under the mountain—down there with the burrowing tree roots and grubbing worms and decaying bones—if he is a corpse to her before he leaves.

It is hard to kill the idea of Bellamy though, while he stands and breathes, always friction against her will, a force to be reckoned with as always. It is hard to bury him under the memory of someone else, a dead someone else who still lurks in the distance, staring at her from the edge of the forest, watching her, reminding her.

_The dead are gone, and the living are hungry._

Looking into the trees instead of the eyes of the boy she can’t lose too, her heart fights to beat steadily, because the darker glow of his skin and the lower rumble of his voice starkly, unwantedly remind her of who he is (Bellamy) and is not (Finn), what he is (alive) and what he is not (dead). She focuses on the distraction, the  _beat-beat_  of her pulse, and what it tells her. She is breathing, being, living.

She is alive, and she is hungry, but she doesn’t know what for. As she steps forward and hands him the map, biting into her cheek so as to not catch his gaze, a metallic tang floods her mouth. It tastes familiar, a comforting flavor. Licking her mouth again, her tongue flicks over the raw spot on the inside of her cheek, a self-inflicted wound that speaks too much of worry, of concern. She made herself bleed, because of him, like he would no doubt be doing for her, for their people, after walking out of the village gates tomorrow. When her eyes snap to his—still dark and now also questioning, making her doubt—her throat closes up, in panic and revulsion, not liking how easily she wounds herself, drawing both blood and fearful thoughts to the surface. She doesn’t like how weak she is.

_The dead are gone, and the living are hungry._

The fire crackles, and he stares; the wind whistles, and she chooses. He will be gone soon, to be their inside man like he had wanted, and as her gaze pulls away from his for the last time, she decides that gone is close enough to dead for her.

Without a single glance back, she turns and walks away, because he is shrouded in darkness, just a guilty boy with eighteen lives on his hands and a knife in his gut, or a rebel boy with the weight of their people on his shoulders and a blade stuck in his back, done in by her own trembling hand either way. She walks away, and then he is not anybody to her. Just dark hair, dark eyes, soon to be absorbed into the dark dirt, dead to the world, dead to her.

She knows how to live with ghosts now, and he haunted her once before. So she is ready to bear it again, the weight of his ashen bones and scorched heart, because as it turns out, despite her earlier plea, she can, and will, lose him too.

* * *

 

**_v. backbone_ **

The bullet missed her, and she is still standing.

Her Trigedakru guard is not though. He slipped away beneath her mother’s capable but shaking hands, under Indra’s sneering glare.

_You people are so weak._

Watching the warrior walk away, Clarke wishes she weren’t still standing. She wants her bones to disintegrate under her skin, letting her fall into a heap of exhausted flesh, like a puppet whose strings have been cut. To rest, for just a minute. To pause, for just a second. To be weak, for just a moment.

But, as she tells her mother, it is just another day on the ground. So she keeps herself upright, walking to engineering, where Raven seethes, and the airlock, where Emerson gloats. It is all she can do to stand straight while her friends’ blood, the very essence of their being, is flowing through the veins of the enemy behind just a mere four inches of glass and steel. It is all she can do to stay vertical when Raven screams at her:  _you_   _do your job!_

Helplessness turns to rage, and though she asks her friend exactly what her job is, she knows, because it is all she has done since her boots hit the forest floor.

All she does is make the rules. ( _It’s not easy being in charge, is it?_ )

All she does is stand alone. ( _Looking to you, princess._ )

All she does is hurt people. ( _This is on you_ — _should’ve kept your mouth shut._ )

She can hear him, the boy she sent into the mountain to die for her and their people, and she is trying, oh oh is she trying, but her strength is buried underneath a pile of rock, where she ordered him to go, suffocating under the weight of her decisions, under the burden of her request.

Her joints groan as they condense, her bones creak as they crumble, the hot rage and frustrated pressure building in her soul turning them soft and malleable. They melt, no longer fit to support her anymore, because she hears him, and she knows he was right. She hears him, she hears him, she hears him: his scornful growl telling her exactly how she is failing him, all of them.

But then Raven hears him too— _Camp Jaha, this is Mount Weather, can anyone read me_ —and everything shifts. Her brittle, bubbling marrow cools, molten metal becoming cold iron as she listens to his tumbling syllables and fearful but determined promises. It coats her bones like armor and forms a cast around her bruised, soft heart, growing with her as she stretches, her spine elongating until she is ten, forty, a thousand feet tall.

Tall enough to face her weakness, tall enough to confront her mother, tall enough to take air from Emerson’s lungs and replace it with fear.

Bellamy may be hundreds of feet under the ground, but she towers hundreds of feet above it, ready to crush the mountain under the heel of her boot, all because she hears him, she hears him, she hears him: his low rumble telling her that he trusts her, that he has faith in her, and so she stands tall.

* * *

 

**_vi. light in the dark_ **

The missile hit days ago, but it is like she is still there that night, a ringing in her ears and fiery light blinding her, blowing out her senses. She moves in darkness, everything shadowed, dipped in the dark rust of dried blood and ashen soot. Pinpoints of light break through: the flicker of a candle in Lexa’s tent, the shine of betrayal in Octavia’s eye, the glint of her gun pressed against the Trigedakru assassin’s neck. They are beacons, not of hope but of something crueler, leading her through the dark shades of war, the gloom of waiting for the battle to start.

Lexa looks at her as if she is a star though, bright and burning, like the village they laid to waste. The commander speaks of hopes and dreams, of birthright and leadership. Those are all things that belong to the light, though, and Clarke hasn’t been able to see in anything but shades of grey since Bellamy left. Her stomach drops as she realizes that it might always be that way, because she sent her warrior to fight and die for her, not knowing it would leave her floundering around like they had when they were first on earth, not used to only moonlight to guide them.

Somehow, entrenched in darkness she is, she can still make out the black of Lexa’s war paint, streaks like jagged fangs, when they kiss, the softness of an otherwise hard girl surprising her. Warmth unfurls inside her, and for a minute she hopes, no she  _wishes_ , because light is warm, and maybe she is not made entirely of shadows and blood, ash and dirt. Maybe there is still something bright inside of her, something that Lexa can kindle. The kiss wraps around her, cocooning her like a blanket, pulling her under covers, like what happens when the sun sinks deep below the horizon and all color disappears with the light and she burrows into her makeshift bed.

Then her heart sinks, just like the sun, bringing her back into the dark because the warmth she is feeling only comes at night. As Lexa clings to her, she realizes the heat isn’t from the light of the sun; it isn’t something that can chase the shadows away. It is firelight, the type of illumination that belongs to the dark, playing with the shadows instead of driving them off, and apparently it is something she can’t seem to escape no matter how hard she tries.

So Clarke pulls away, heartbroken and shivering, and then Lexa slips away, calls of  _heda! heda!_  obscuring the blushing girl beneath the stoic commander.

When they go outside, however, the red of Lexa’s cheeks pales in comparison to the sparkling crimson streak arcing across the grey sky, and suddenly, dawn breaks, throwing everything within Clarke’s sight into shades of white, shades of light.

_Bellamy did it._

She swallows, and her chin trembles, because she can see the sky again, and the trees, and the faces of their people. Even better, she can see the faint, glistening glimpse of victory in their future, illuminated in the glow of the flare that tells her Bellamy succeeded.

Lexa retreats to rally the troops, and Clarke follows, but she can’t look away from the flare just yet. She steps backwards, slow and sure, tracking the beacon with clear eyes. A smile curves onto her face, and she thinks of another night, of another flare, of wishes and shooting stars, of her question and his unexpected answer.

_I wouldn’t know what to wish for._

That night at the dropship, she had had a thousand wishes. Now, though, she doesn’t have a wish to make, because she doesn’t need one. He came through for her, for all of them, like he always did. She didn’t have to wish for that, and, if the war cries echoing through the valley were any indication, she wouldn’t have to wish for his safe return either.

They were going win, and she would get him back, and in the newly illuminated world around her, she finally could see that, she finally knew it, plain as daylight, and it was all because of him.

* * *

 

**_vii. nothing_ **

She looks into the paint-smeared eyes of his little sister, who screams at her in blame, and she chokes, because even there, in that furious gaze, she can’t find a piece of him. Octavia’s eyes don’t look like his, and her voice is too high and angry to be like his. She is too short to be him, and her hair is too long, and Clarke feels all sensation drain from her body, because  _he isn’t here._

He isn’t an apparition, and he isn’t a missing piece at her side. He isn’t too far away, and he isn’t somebody else. He might be dead, but even then at least she would know where he is. She can’t hear him, not even the memory of his voice comes to her now, and all she can see is the metal door and the blue glow of the keypad, the mossy, damp rocks of the tunnel walls and the flash of Octavia’s face as she rants and rails. It is dark, and she is well and truly lost because she sees nothing.

Clarke goes numb, her limbs moving without permission, without sense. She bangs on the door in perfect time with Octavia’s screams, points her gun with as much wild imprecision as the girl’s accusations.

Then the door beeps, and creaks open, and Bellamy is there. She stares, not blinking once as all breath leaves her body, her vision glazing over until he is a blur, smeared into shades of brown by the tears welling up in her eyes. She stares until she can’t see him anymore, because if she sees him, then he sees her too. She doesn’t want him looking at her; there is nothing good in her for him to see anymore.

Their people need them, though, so she clears her eyes, and looks to him and lets him see all that she lacks—no army, no plan, no hope—and moves forward into the dark mouth of the mountain.

She moves forward, because the only choice she has is to go further into the void, and to her despair, she pulls him along with her into the nothingness when they pull the lever together.

* * *

 

**_+i. man_ **

She can see it now, in the slump of his shoulders, in his dragging steps. No longer the boy king, rebel king, but a hero in his own right. It makes her hollow chest ache, because it wasn’t the ground that did that to him, that made him a man full grown.

It had been her.

All this time he had just been a boy in world that had tried so hard to make him into a man, but he fought it, waging war against the dirt determined to dirty his soul and the rocks trying to build themselves into a wall around his heart.

Earth wasn’t able to make him a man, but she was. She did that to him—with a kiss to his cheek and a  _may we meet again_ —just a girl with a broken crown and a heart harder than the ground under her feet.

So she can see it now. He is a man winning the game of having the weight of the world on his shoulders, and she is a just girl, crumbling to dust behind his back, watching him as she walks away.  

**Author's Note:**

> To date, this is probably the piece I'm proudest of, style-wise so I'd love to hear your thoughts :)
> 
> Come find me on tumblr (kay-emm-gee)!


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